Tastemaker

In The Guardian:
A parade of prostitutes and their clients aimed at naming and shaming sex workers in southern China has sparked a backlash by an unusual coalition of lawyers, academics and the All-China Women's Federation.
As part of a two-month crackdown on vice in the booming city of Shenzhen, public security officers handcuffed about 100 women and some of their male customers, dressed them in bright yellow prison tunics and hauled them through the streets.

The parade, which took place on November 29, attracted large crowds of curious onlookers.
Although the women tried to cover their faces with surgical masks, it was not enough to hide their identities because police revealed their names, hometowns and dates of birth while publicly sentencing them all to 15 days in prison.

In a sign of the increased consciousness of individual versus social rights, police were criticised for going too far.

"I think the parade is a violation of human rights," said Ai Xiaoming, a professor at Guangdong's Sun Yat-Set University. "The public humiliation may frighten people, but it is not a good way for resolving problems. And it is not fair - why are only sex criminals paraded in public? What about people guilty of graft and corruption?"

The All-China Women's Federation has filed a formal protest with the ministry of public security, saying the parade was "old-fashioned, damaging to social harmony" and "an insult to all the women in China".

There was a surge of critical comment on internet bulletin boards about the ethical problems of the punishment. Legal questions were also raised by Yao Jianguo of the Shanghai Promise Law Firm, who has written a letter of complaint to the National People's Congress in which he accused the police of acting illegally and violating human dignity.

The resurgence of the "skin-and-flesh" trade has become increasingly visible since the start of China's free market economic reforms in the late 1970s.

Among the most notorious centres are Shenzhen and Zhuhai - the biggest mainland cities near wealthy Hong Kong - where there are streets full of pink-lit karaoke centres and massage parlours.

Previous attempts to tackle the industry have had mixed results. Three years ago, the organisers of an orgy by more than 200 Japanese sex tourists and local prostitutes were sentenced to life imprisonment. Earlier this year, thousands of armed police were deployed in Shenzhen to quash a protest by more than 3,000 prostitutes and karaoke hostesses who were left without jobs after the closure of massage parlours and discos.

· Jonathan Watts in Beijing with additional reporting by Huang Lisha

Thursday, South Africa officially became the 5th country in the world to legalize gay marriage. Let's hope this starts a trend. -HCS

New questions on the US Citizenship Test:

Why does the United States have three branches of government?
Name two rights that are only for US citizens
Name two cabinet-level positions
Name one important idea found in the Declaration of Independence
What does the Constitution do?

info from BBC World News

This list just left me doing my own rabid musings on what DOES the Constitution do? I'm personally of the belief that people and culture (and their needs) grow and change over time, and that the beliefs we hold dear also grow and change. I'm a believer in throwing off the bonds of tyranny, but does that mean we have to take the Old set of rules made by people who may or may not have actually held beliefs similar to our present-day beliefs, and kowtow to the Old forever? Puritans had no voice or land in England, they were disenfranchised by Charles I before cutting off his head, disenfranchised by Charles II during the restoration, they came here and created their own religious communities which were not so tolerant of dissidence. Whigs had no land, they came to America and grabbed land. James Stuart Duke of York needed money, he created the West India Company to import slaves, and Virginia ate them up. Don't you think it's time to base our current government on our current ideals??? My beliefs run concurrent with the thinking of many of the Royal Society members (some of whom were indeed Founders of this nation) - push the envelope, find out what things are made of, question the world as it exists, imagine the world as it could be. -HCS

Just in on Wonkette: Again with the military blocking Wonkette so our fighting forces won’t be exposed to inane exchanges from Late Night Shots. A Wonkette operative at a U.S. Army base in Europe sent us this shocking evidence. (Tastemaker Readers, click on the link to Wonkette to see a screen capture of the "Forbidden by Rating Check" notice that one soldier got when he tried to access the site) We asked the soldier to try some other political sites and report back, but he hasn’t answered because the Army killed him, probably.

Dear Pentagon IT Pricks: The election’s over, Iraq is lost and Rumsfeld’s out. Please let soldiers read websites so they can have some of those freedoms you people are always defending for Iraqis or whatever. Thanks.

From CNN:
CNN correspondent John Roberts, who recently returned from Iraq, says that U.S. television has been unable to convey the extent of the chaos that currently wracks that country. "The place is a mess. It's an absolute mess," Roberts told The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz on CNN's Reliable Sources. "There is nowhere you can go in the Baghdad area as a Western journalist without an escort, where you could feel safe from being kidnapped, shot at, whatever. The amount of death that's on the streets of Baghdad for U.S. forces and for the Iraqi people is at an astronomical level." Roberts said that he saw the results of an attack on a Humvee in which the U.S. soldier seated in the passenger seat was "disintegrated" by the projectile. He said he watched the driver die on the roadside. None of that could be shown on television, Roberts observed. "The pictures on television are sanitized compared to what they are on the ground. ... It's too raw for television. It's too personal for the families who were involved, because the fellow who I saw on the ground, Howie, he was ripped apart. And that's just not the sort of thing that you want a family to know."

And there's the rub: the REALITY is too horrible to bear, but in order to change what is real, we must be able to admit it is ACTUALLY HAPPENING. And we do that by being brave enough to bear witness, and by confronting our own feelings of helplessness as we watch our government smear our human rights reputation and our children's blood all over the sand. -HCS

From NBC News: When the U.S. government's version of the United Way handed out hundreds of millions of dollars to charities last year, its largesse extended to more than 1,280 nonprofit organizations that collectively owe $36 million in taxes dating back as far as 1988.

At the same time, other federal agencies gave $1.6 billion in grants to at least 170 of the delinquent charities, which account for nearly 6 percent of the approximately 22,700 charities funded by the Combined Federal Campaign.

And every one of 15 charities that underwent a detailed audit by investigators at the Government Accountability Office was found to be engaged in “abusive and potentially criminal activity,” according to a report on the investigation.
The GAO referred the charities to the Internal Revenue Service, for criminal investigation and collection.

Among them was a mental health clinic that owed more than $1.5 million and has a track record of failure to remit payroll taxes stretching back for 15 years. The director of the clinic, the report said, diverted the tax money to pay his own salary and that of some employees.

Meanwhile, a drug and alcohol rehab center that owed more than $70,000 in taxes managed to find money to buy a boat for its executive director's use.

“Rather than fulfill their role as trustees … the directors and senior officers diverted the money for charity-related expenses, including their own salaries, some of which were in excess of $100,000,” according to the GAO report, which drew little notice when it was released in July.


The people responsible for vetting the CFC charities and managing the money that federal employees contribute every year have been scrambling to reform the system since the congressionally ordered investigation uncovered the delinquent tax problems. But the effort has run into roadblocks, including a law that prohibits managers of the CFC fund from even checking whether charities that get its money might be committing tax fraud.

According to Washington insiders, there are moves afoot to dump Vice President Dick Cheney and replace him with either John McCain or Rudolph Giuliani prior to the 2008 presidential election. Whoever succeeds Cheney will be able to campaign for the presidency with the perks that come with being an incumbent Vice President.
Since the increasingly-besieged Cheney has signaled he has no intention of voluntarily stepping down, the strategy by the Bush camp may be to force him out by presenting evidence before Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald that it was Cheney who was responsible for the compromise of CIA non-proliferation covert officer Valerie Plame Wilson and her Brewster Jennings & Associates cover firm.

Observers note the unusual professional relationship between Fitzgerald and Karl Rove's defense attorney Robert Luskin. Insiders believe that Fitzgerald may be proffered a carefully crafted deal by Luskin whereby Rove will testify to Cheney's primary role in the outing of Mrs. Wilson and her firm. The sealed indictment of Rove will then be retired permanently. If such a deal is worked out, Fitzgerald may then offer a deal to Lewis I. "Scooter" Libby, Cheney's former Chief of Staff, to also testify against Cheney. With such double-barreled testimony, President Bush will then be compelled to ask Cheney for his resignation or face a very nasty and public indictment.
-Wayne Madesn

I feel so warm and fuzzy. I am DYING to watch Cheney go rabid against his own peeps. This is DELICIOUS.

We did it!!! We've won the House, won the Senate, and finally have a proper check and balance to the Executive branch. My faith in Democracy is surging! Thank you, Montana, thank you Virginia.

Bush just announced it. Major happiness. Good things are coming out of this election, and I'm finally feelin' some pride!

Kevin Tillman joined the Army with his brother Pat in 2002, and they served together in Iraq and Afghanistan. Pat was killed in Afghanistan on April 22, 2004. Kevin, who was discharged in 2005, has written a powerful, must-read document:

It is Pat's birthday on November 6, and elections are the day after. It gets me thinking about a conversation I had with Pat before we joined the military. He spoke about the risks with signing the papers. How once we committed, we were at the mercy of the American leadership and the American people. How we could be thrown in a direction not of our volition.
How fighting as a soldier would leave us without a voice until we got out.

Much has happened since we handed over our voice:

Somehow we were sent to invade a nation because it was a direct threat to the American people, or to the world, or harbored terrorists, or was involved in the September 11 attacks, or received weapons-grade uranium from Niger, or had mobile weapons labs, or WMD, or had a need to be liberated, or we needed to establish a democracy, or stop an insurgency, or stop a civil war we created that can't be called a civil war even though it is. Something like that.

Somehow America has become a country that projects everything that it is not and condemns everything that it is.

Somehow our elected leaders were subverting international law and humanity by setting up secret prisons around the world, secretly kidnapping people, secretly holding them indefinitely, secretly not charging them with anything, secretly torturing them.
Somehow that overt policy of torture became the fault of a few "bad apples" in the military.

Somehow back at home, support for the soldiers meant having a five-year-old kindergartener scribble a picture with crayons and send it overseas, or slapping stickers on cars, or lobbying Congress for an extra pad in a helmet. It's interesting that a soldier on his third or fourth tour should care about a drawing from a five-year-old; or a faded sticker on a car as his friends die around him; or an extra pad in a helmet, as if it will protect him when an IED throws his vehicle 50 feet into the air as his body comes apart and his skin melts to the seat.

Somehow the more soldiers that die, the more legitimate the illegal invasion becomes.

Somehow American leadership, whose only credit is lying to its people and illegally invading a nation, has been allowed to steal the courage, virtue and honor of its soldiers on the ground.

Somehow those afraid to fight an illegal invasion decades ago are allowed to send soldiers to die for an illegal invasion they started.

Somehow faking character, virtue and strength is tolerated.

Somehow profiting from tragedy and horror is tolerated.

Somehow the death of tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of people is tolerated.

Somehow subversion of the Bill of Rights and The Constitution is tolerated.

Somehow suspension of Habeas Corpus is supposed to keep this country safe.

Somehow torture is tolerated.

Somehow lying is tolerated.

Somehow reason is being discarded for faith, dogma, and nonsense.

Somehow American leadership managed to create a more dangerous world.

Somehow a narrative is more important than reality.

Somehow America has become a country that projects everything that it is not and condemns everything that it is.

Somehow the most reasonable, trusted and respected country in the world has become one of the most irrational, belligerent, feared, and distrusted countries in the world.

Somehow being politically informed, diligent, and skeptical has been replaced by apathy through active ignorance.

Somehow the same incompetent, narcissistic, virtueless, vacuous, malicious criminals are still in charge of this country.

Somehow this is tolerated.

Somehow nobody is accountable for this.

In a democracy, the policy of the leaders is the policy of the people. So don't be shocked when our grandkids bury much of this generation as traitors to the nation, to the world and to humanity. Most likely, they will come to know that "somehow" was nurtured by fear, insecurity and indifference, leaving the country vulnerable to unchecked, unchallenged parasites.

Luckily this country is still a democracy. People still have a voice. People still can take action. It can start after Pat's birthday.

Brother and Friend of Pat Tillman,

Kevin Tillman